Software deployment is all of the activities that make a

software system A software system is a system of intercommunicating components based on software forming part of a computer system (a combination of hardware and software). It "consists of a number of separate programs, configuration files, which are used to se ...

available for use. The general deployment process consists of several interrelated activities with possible transitions between them. These activities can occur on the

producer Producer or producers may refer to: Occupations *Producer (agriculture), a farm operator *A stakeholder of economic production *Film producer, supervises the making of films **Executive producer, contributes to a film's budget and usually does not ...

side or on the

consumer A consumer is a person or a group who intends to order, or uses purchased goods, products, or services primarily for personal, social, family, household and similar needs, who is not directly related to entrepreneurial or business activities. T ...

side or both. Because every software system is unique, the precise processes or

procedures Procedure may refer to: * Medical procedure * Instructions or recipes, a set of commands that show how to achieve some result, such as to prepare or make something * Procedure (business), specifying parts of a business process * Standard operati ...

within each activity can hardly be defined. Therefore, "deployment" should be interpreted as a ''general process'' that has to be customized according to specific requirements or characteristics.

History

When computers were extremely large, expensive, and bulky (

mainframe A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise ...

s and

minicomputer A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a class of smaller general purpose computers that developed in the mid-1960s and sold at a much lower price than mainframe and mid-size computers from IBM and its direct competitors. In a 1970 survey, ...

s), the software was often bundled together with the hardware by manufacturers. If business software needed to be installed on an existing computer, this might require an expensive, time-consuming visit by a

systems architect The systems architect is an information and communications technology professional. Systems architects define the architecture of a computerized system (i.e., a system composed of software and hardware) in order to fulfill certain requirements. ...

or a

consultant A consultant (from la, consultare "to deliberate") is a professional (also known as ''expert'', ''specialist'', see variations of meaning below) who provides advice and other purposeful activities in an area of specialization. Consulting servic ...

. For complex, on-premises installation of

enterprise software Enterprise software, also known as enterprise application software (EAS), is computer software used to satisfy the needs of an organization rather than individual users. Such organizations include businesses, schools, interest-based user groups, ...

today, this can still sometimes be the case. However, with the development of mass-market software for the new age of microcomputers in the 1980s came new forms of

software distribution Software distribution is the process of delivering software to the end user. A distro is a collection of software components built, assembled and configured so that it can essentially be used "as is". It is often the closest thing to turnkey form ...

first cartridges, then

Compact Cassette The Compact Cassette or Musicassette (MC), also commonly called the tape cassette, cassette tape, audio cassette, or simply tape or cassette, is an analog magnetic tape recording format for audio recording and playback. Invented by Lou Ottens ...

s, then

floppy disk A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, or a diskette) is an obsolescent type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined w ...

s, then (in the 1990s and later) optical media, the

internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

and

flash drives A flash drive is a portable computer drive that uses flash memory. Flash drives are the larger memory modules consisting of a number of flash chips. A flash chip is used to read the contents of a single cell, but it can write entire block of cel ...

. This meant that software deployment could be left to the customer. However, it was also increasingly recognized over time that configuration of the software by the customer was important and that this should ideally have a user-friendly interface (rather than, for example, requiring the customer to edit registry entries on Windows). In pre-internet software deployments, deployments (and their closely related cousin, new software releases) were of necessity expensive, infrequent, bulky affairs. It is arguable therefore that the spread of the internet made end-to-end

agile software development In software development, agile (sometimes written Agile) practices include requirements discovery and solutions improvement through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams with their customer(s)/ end user(s), ad ...

possible. Indeed, the advent of

cloud computing Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mul ...

and

software as a service Software as a service (SaaS ) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as "on-demand software" and Web-based/Web-hosted software. SaaS is con ...

meant that software could be deployed to a large number of customers in minutes, over the internet. This also meant that typically, deployment schedules were now determined by the software supplier, not by the customers. Such flexibility led to the rise of

continuous delivery Continuous delivery (CD) is a software engineering approach in which teams produce software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time and, following a pipeline through a "production-like environment", withou ...

as a viable option, especially for less risky

web application A web application (or web app) is application software that is accessed using a web browser. Web applications are delivered on the World Wide Web to users with an active network connection. History In earlier computing models like client-serve ...

Deployment activities

; Release: The

release Release may refer to: * Art release, the public distribution of an artistic production, such as a film, album, or song * Legal release, a legal instrument * News release, a communication directed at the news media * Release (ISUP), a code to ident ...

activity follows from the completed the development process and is sometimes classified as part of the development process rather than deployment process. It includes all the operations to prepare a system for

assembly Assembly may refer to: Organisations and meetings * Deliberative assembly, a gathering of members who use parliamentary procedure for making decisions * General assembly, an official meeting of the members of an organization or of their representa ...

and transfer to the computer system(s) on which it will be run in production. Therefore, it sometimes involves determining the resources required for the system to operate with tolerable performance and planning and/or documenting subsequent activities of the deployment process. ; Installation and activation: For simple systems, installation involves establishing some form of a

command Command may refer to: Computing * Command (computing), a statement in a computer language * COMMAND.COM, the default operating system shell and command-line interpreter for DOS * Command key, a modifier key on Apple Macintosh computer keyboards * ...

, shortcut, script or

service Service may refer to: Activities * Administrative service, a required part of the workload of university faculty * Civil service, the body of employees of a government * Community service, volunteer service for the benefit of a community or a pu ...

for executing the software (manually or automatically). For complex systems it may involve configuration of the system possibly by asking the end-user questions about its intended use, or directly asking them how they would like it to be configured and/or making all the required subsystems ready to use. Activation is the activity of starting up the

executable In computing, executable code, an executable file, or an executable program, sometimes simply referred to as an executable or binary, causes a computer "to perform indicated tasks according to encoded instruction (computer science), instructi ...

component of software for the first time (not to be confused with the common use of the term ''activation'' concerning a software license, which is a function of

Digital Rights Management Digital rights management (DRM) is the management of legal access to digital content. Various tools or technological protection measures (TPM) such as access control technologies can restrict the use of proprietary hardware and copyrighted works. ...

systems.) : In larger software deployments on servers, the main copy of the software to be used by users - "production" - might be installed on a production server in a production environment. Other versions of the deployed software may be installed in a

test environment In software deployment, an environment or tier is a computer system or set of systems in which a computer program or software component is deployed and executed. In simple cases, such as developing and immediately executing a program on the same m ...

, development environment and disaster recovery environment. : In complex

environments and/or

system, differently-configured versions of the system might even exist simultaneously in the production environment for different internal or external customers (this is known as a ''multi-tenant architecture''), or even be gradually rolled out in parallel to different groups of customers, with the possibility of canceling one or more of the parallel deployments. For example,

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

is known to use the latter approach for A/B testing of new features and

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine f ...

changes. A "hidden live" group can also be created within a production environment, consisting of servers that are not yet connected to the production

load balancer In computing, load balancing is the process of distributing a set of tasks over a set of resources (computing units), with the aim of making their overall processing more efficient. Load balancing can optimize the response time and avoid unevenl ...

, for the purposes of blue-green deployment. ; Deactivation: Deactivation is the inverse of activation and refers to shutting down any already-executing components of a system. Deactivation is often required to perform other deployment activities, e.g., a software system may need to be deactivated before an update can be performed. The practice of removing infrequently used or obsolete systems from service is often referred to as

application retirement Application retirement, also called application decommissioning and application sunsetting, is the practice of shutting down redundant or obsolete business applications while retaining access to the historical data. Legacy applications are often ma ...

or application decommissioning. ; Uninstallation: Uninstallation is the inverse of installation. It is the removal of a system that is no longer required. It may also involve some reconfiguration of other software systems to remove the uninstalled system's dependencies. ; Update: The update process replaces an earlier version of all or part of a software system with a newer release. It commonly consists of deactivation followed by installation. On some systems, such as on Linux when using the system's package manager, the old version of a software application is typically also uninstalled as an automatic part of the process. (This is because Linux package managers do not typically support installing multiple versions of a software application at the same time unless the software package has been specifically designed to work around this limitation.) ; Built-in update: Mechanisms for installing updates are built into some software systems (or, in the case of some operating systems such as

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

Android Android may refer to: Science and technology * Android (robot), a humanoid robot or synthetic organism designed to imitate a human * Android (operating system), Google's mobile operating system ** Bugdroid, a Google mascot sometimes referred to ...

and

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also includes ...

, into the operating system itself). Automation of these update processes ranges from fully automatic to user-initiated and controlled.

Norton Internet Security Norton Internet Security, developed by Symantec Corporation, is a discontinued computer program that provides malware protection and removal during a subscription period. It uses signatures and heuristics to identify viruses. Other features inc ...

is an example of a system with a semi-automatic method for retrieving and installing updates to both the antivirus definitions and other components of the system. Other software products provide query mechanisms for determining when updates are available. ; Version tracking: Version tracking systems help the user find and install updates to software systems. For example: The Software Catalog stores the version and other information for each software package installed on a local system. One-click of a button launches a browser window to the upgrade web page for the application, including auto-filling of the user name and password for sites that require a login. On Linux, Android and iOS this process is even easier because a standardized process for version tracking (for software packages installed in the officially supported way) is built into the operating system, so no separate login, download and execute steps are required so the process can be configured to be fully automated. Some third-party software also supports automated version tracking and upgrading for certain Windows software packages.

Deployment roles

The complexity and variability of software products have fostered the emergence of specialized roles for coordinating and engineering the deployment process. For desktop systems, end-users frequently also become the "software deployers" when they install a software package on their machine. The deployment of

involves many more roles, and those roles typically change as the application progresses from the test (pre-production) to production environments. Typical roles involved in software deployments for enterprise applications may include: * in pre-production environments: ** application developers: see

Software development process In software engineering, a software development process is a process of dividing software development work into smaller, parallel, or sequential steps or sub-processes to improve design, product management. It is also known as a software devel ...

** build-and-release engineers: see Release engineering ** release managers: see

Release management Release management is the process of managing, planning, scheduling and controlling a software build through different stages and environments; it includes testing and deploying software releases. Relationship with processes Organizations that ...

** deployment coordinators: see DevOps * in production environments: ** system administrator ** database administrator ** release coordinators: see DevOps ** operations project managers: see

ITIL The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a set of detailed practices for IT activities such as IT service management (ITSM) and IT asset management (ITAM) that focus on aligning IT services with the needs of business. ITIL de ...

References

External links

* Standardization efforts *
Solution Installation Schema Submission request to W3C
*
OASIS Solution Deployment Descriptor TC
*
OMG Specification for Deployment and Configuration of Component-based Distributed Applications
(OMG D&C) *
JSR 88: Java EE Application Deployment
* Articles ** * Resources
Visual Studio Release Management
{{DEFAULTSORT:Software Deployment Software distribution System administration Software release

History

Deployment activities

Deployment roles

See also

References

External links